"A snob? When I am true to the best traditions of my race? Did you not
tell me that you would not marry a Venus if she happened to be born
outside of your own class? But it is rather cold here--not? Shall I send
the note of introduction to your flat?"

"I would not put my foot in any supercilious junker palace, and I never
wish to see you again!" He whirled about, burying his nose in his
handkerchief, and tore down the street.

Gisela laughed, but with little amusement. Her sympathy for German women
took a long stride. But she forgot him a few moments later at her desk.


4

During the next five years she wrote many short stories and essays, and
four plays. Her work appealed subtly but clearly to the growing
rebellion of the German women; she was too much of an artist to write
frank propaganda and the critics were long waking up to the object of
her work. Her first three plays were failures, but the fourth ran for
two years and a half and was played all over Germany and Austria. It was
a brilliant, dramatic, half-humorous, half-tragic exposition of the
German woman's enforced subservience to man as compared with the
glorious liberty of the somewhat exaggerated American co-heroine.

There was talk of suppressing this play at first, but Countess Niebuhr
brought all her influence to bear, and as the widow of one esteemed
junker and the daughter of another far more important, her argument that
her daughter merely labored to make the German woman a still more